Convex relaxation of power dispatch for voltage stability improvement

A method for enhancing the voltage stability of a power system is presented in this paper. The method is based on a stability-constrained optimal power flow approach, where dispatch is done such that a maximum L-index is minimised for all load busses in a transmission grid. It is shown that optimal dispatch is obtainable with enhanced margins for voltage stability using a semidefinite relaxation of the optimal power flow problem, and that this problem can be formulated as semidefinite program with a quasi-convex objective. Numerical tests are performed on the IEEE-30 bus and BPA systems. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated through demonstrating that improved voltage stability margins are obtained for both systems.